Times are changing, and the regulatory and legalistic approach to managing prevention in companies seems to be about to pass away.

When we started in this field of ORP, we understood prevention management as a purely technical management focused on compliance with the law. Today, the paradigm has changed; companies need to implement and integrate prevention in all aspects of their activity.

We need a more holistic view of how to implement risk prevention in our organizations.

In the past (very recent), the most sought-after occupational risk prevention professionals were professionals with a technical profile. Nowadays, professionals from branches belonging to the humanities are more necessary than ever.

What is the reason for this change?

To a change of perspective, in relation to how we can attack the problems of preventive management in companies.

Based on the fact that 85-90% of the causes of accidents are due to what we call the human factor, it is necessary, while continuing to manage the unsafe conditions of the work environment, to focus on a less “technical” and more “human” management.

What does a more “human” management mean? Are prevention technicians prepared for this type of management?

The formal training, which qualifies a prevention technician, is eminently

technical, and deals very little with the management of the human factor.

The necessary skills to manage Risk Prevention, from the most human side of the organizations, are not obtained with such formal training.

What are these skills?

Among them, we could mention leadership, influence capacity, teamwork capacity, adaptation and resilience, communication skills, conflict management, assertiveness, self-knowledge and mutual knowledge; all of them based on emotional intelligence.

This paradigm shift occurs, after all, because organizations are groups of people who interact and it is necessary to manage these interactions in a more systemic way.

Organizations not only need to comply with regulations, they also need to achieve prevention objectives, and for this we must work on the human factor as a cause of occupational accidents.

What is the human factor ?

It is the causal factor in 85-90% of occupational accidents. It is divided into two subfactors:

• Human Error
• Organizational factor

This may lead one to think that the people who are part of the organizations are the cause of accidents, since people always make mistakes.

"man is the only animal capable of stumbling twice over the same stone".

But nothing could be further from the truth, in fact, human error is a consequence of the organizational problems that companies have, and therefore they are closely related.

Human error will always exist ( Errare humanum est), so we have gone from aiming for zero accidents to thinking about achieving zero damage(VISION ZERO ).

Paradoxically, although the human factor represents a very high proportion of the causality in accidents, the cost of achieving corporate and organizational change is around 10% of the budget that companies have for occupational risk prevention.

How do we address this issue? Are companies prepared to manage prevention from this perspective?

There are several trends in human factor-based security management, including SBC (behavior-based security) and SBO (security based on the organization), both of which are complementary and work to reduce the impact of the human factor on the security of organizations.

The SBC is a management tool based on the observation of safe behaviors in the workplace and whose purpose is to reinforce and improve the performance or safe behavior of all components of an organization.

Traditionally, an accident or incident has been attributed to the behavior of a worker, but an accident goes beyond an unsafe act or an inadequate decision made by a worker, it is something more complex that requires a holistic and systemic vision of the organization, in which SBO (Safety Based on the organization) also called HOP (Human Organizational Performance) works .

The SBO works on organizational concepts such as leadership, communication, fair treatment, commitment, in short: the preventive culture of the organization.

And how can we measure the culture of the organization?

Culture is a system of shared values based on the perceptions of the organization’s members.

How do we measure these perceptions?

There are tools such as the Nordic Occupational Safety Climate Questionnaire – NOSACQ-50 that analyzes different dimensions of the preventive culture of the organization, to obtain results that determine the preventive maturity of the organization, classifying it in one of the levels defined in the scale of preventive culture of Parker and Hudson.

• Pathological
• Reagent
• Calculator
• Proactive
• Generative

What are the Preventive Culture Dimensions of the Nordic Occupational Safety Climate Questionnaire- NOSACQ-50?

The Nordic Safety Climate Questionnaire (NOSACQ-50) is a diagnostic tool that evaluates the safety climate of an organization through 7 dimensions, 3 related to safety management (commitment, involvement and equity) and 4 to collective attitudes (commitment, risk awareness, learning and confidence in safety).

Commitment drives, dynamization translates and learning sustains: together they form the pillars of a mature preventive culture, where safety is not an obligation, but a conscious way of working and living together.

Only when prevention becomes a shared value does safety cease to be a pending task and becomes an essential part of the corporate culture.

Fostering a strong preventive culture is not only a legal obligation, but a strategic investment in the well-being of people and the sustainability of organizations.